Someone in the house hogging the Sky Box? Away from home and missed an episode of “House”? – I might have the answer for you.

I finally got round to trying out the new Sky Player plug-in for Windows 7 Media Center over the weekend. I must admit that I came away quite impressed with the slickness of the finished product. Sky and Microsoft combined to roll out the Media Center Plugin in the UK before Christmas. For unknown reasons, those of us in Ireland had to wait until the start of February before it was officially available.

The great beauty of the integration is that there is no installation required. You open up Windows Media Center on your Windows 7 PC and suddenly it has appeared in the Movies and TV options. One click brings you to a selection screen where you can watch Live TV or select from “On Demand” shows which are downloaded, as the name suggests, on demand. You do, however, need to go to sky.com and activate your Sky account for Sky Player to avail of content that is free with your Sky package. After that, log in and enjoy.

And if you don’t have a sky subscription, no problem – Sky will gladly allow you to view a lot of the content for what I’m sure they believe is a modest consideration.

Playback of the episode of “Bones” that I watched was good though there was a bit of jerkiness on fast moving scenes. Overall I was left with the impression that this really is the way we’ll watch TV in the future. All we need now is for the other TV channels to match this level of integration so that we are not left using multiple websites and applications to watch programs from different providers.

The one drawback that I experienced was that I couldn’t use my Xbox 360 Media Centre Extender to view Sky Player. This is because Sky are already offering the Sky Player separately on the Xbox 360. However, where my Sky subscription allows me to view Sky Player on my Windows Media Center, I need an Xbox Live Gold subscription to access the same functionality on the Xbox. Since I’m not a regular gamer, I don’t feel the urge to maintain another subscription but I’m sure others will feel differently.

In summary though, a nice product, thoughtfully implemented.

If you have any problems with these steps or any other problems please don’t hesitate to call one of our qualified engineers and technicians and we will be delighted to perform the required steps to deal with your problem.